How to lie with Statistics is a classic. A ‘sort of primer in ways to use statistics to deceive’, says the author Darrell Huff. Why teach the world how to lie with statistics? Because, he says, ‘crooks already know these tricks; honest men must learn them in self-defence’.

The bulk of the book is worked examples of classic statistical slights-of-hand: graphs with missing sections on the axes, different kinds of averages, post-hoc observation of correlations. What I want to do here is just review the last chapter ‘How to talk back to statistics’, which gives some rules of thumb on how to ‘look a phoney statistic in the eye and face it down’ whilst recognising ‘sound and usable data in the wilderness of fraud’. Huff gives the reader five simple questions with which to arms themselves, which i summarise and then provide some commentary on at the end.

Huff’s five questions with which to arm yourself against statistics:

1. Who says so?

Can we suspect deliberate or unconscious bias in the originator of the statistic? Huff recommends looking for an “O.K Name” – e.g. a university – as some slim promise of reliability. Second to this he recommends being careful to distinguish the originator of the ‘data’ from the originator of the conclusion or intepretation.

2. How Does He Know?

Is the sample biased? representative? large enough?

3. What’s Missing?

Statistics given without a measure of realiability are ‘not to be taken very seriously’. What is the relevant base rates / appropriate comparison figure? Do averages disguide important variations?

4. Did somebody change the subject?

E.g. More reported cases are not the same as more cases, what people say they do (or will do) is not the same as what they actually do (or will do), association (correlation) is not causation.

5. Does it make sense?

Is the figure spuriously accuracy? Convert percentages to real numbers and convert real numbers to percentages, compare both with your intuitions.

Commentary by tom

Who says so?

Two things interest me about the recommendation to base judgements of credibility, even if just in part, on authority. Firstly, by doing this Huff is conceeding that we are simply not able to make a thorough independent evaluation of the facts ourselves. This is in contradiction to the idea that science is Best because if we doubt something we can check it out for ourselves. The pragmatic response to this is obviously ‘well, you won’t check out everything, but you could check out any individual thing if you wanted’. Is this much consolation in a world where everyone, including the authorities, are assaulted by too much information to check out personally? Scientific authority then becomes a matter of which social structures, which use which truth-heuristics, you trust rather than a matter of direct proof (“it says so in the bible!” verses “it says so in a respectable academic paper!”?).

The second thing that interests me is that the advice to rely on authorities becomes problemmatic for those who either don’t know who the authorities are, or who distrust the usual authorities. What proportion of the population knows that the basic unit of scientific authority is the peer-reviewed journal paper? You can see that if you don’t know this you immediately lose a vital heuristic for evaluating the credibility of research you are told about. In a similar vein, even experts in one domain may be ignorant of the authorities in another domain — leading to similar problems with judging credibility. If you know about but simply don’t trust the established authorities you are similarly lost at sea when trying to evaluate incoming evidence (a reason, I’ll bet, for the mixed quality of information available from, variously, conspiracy theorists and alternative medicine practicioners).

How Does He Know?

This is perhaps the most important question you can ask in my opinion. Often all that is required to dispell the superficially-convincing fog that accompanies some statistic or factoid is to ask How did they find out? What would actually be involved in gathering that information? Could it possibly be correct? For example, ‘if you die in your dream, you really die’ How do they know?! Dead people aren’t exactly available for comment.

What’s Missing?

Knowing what is missing is the hardest trick, in my opinion. It’s a mark both of expertise and of genuine intelligence to be able to pick up on what isn’t being said, to notice when the intepretation of what you’re being told could be fundamentally altered by something you aren’t being told (because, of course, this involes imaging a bunch of counter-factuals). Outside the realm of statistics the idea of frame-analysis speaks to this idea of making invisible what isn’t talked about.

Did somebody change the subject?

Does it make sense?

Both good checks to carry out when challenged by a statistic. It is unfortunate that statistics seem to have an inherant air of authority – a kind of wow factor – and these questions are good tools with which to start dismantling it. I think this wow factor is because statistics seem to imply rigourous, unbiased, comprenhensive investigation, even though they may in fact arise from nothing of the sort. In the same way that evolution will produce imitators who have the colouration of being poisonous, or whatever, without actually bothering to have to produce the poison, and most social situations will attract free-riders who want to get the benefits without paying the costs, so there is an evolution of rhetoric strategies to include things which carry the trappings of credible information without going through the processes which are actually causal in making the information from these sources credible. So we get statistics because everybody knows science uses statistics, we get figures quoted to the second decimal place when the margin of error is a hundred times larger than this level of accuracy, and we get nonsensical arguments supported using citations, even though the studies or works cited are utterly without credibility, because having citations in your arguments is an established form of credible arguments which is easy to reproduce for any argument, whatever the level of credibility.

When I first come into the studio to work, there is this noisy crowd which follows me there; it includes all of the important painters in history, all of my contemporaries, all the art critics, etc. As I become involved in the work, one by one, they all leave. If I’m lucky, every one of them will disappear. If I’m really lucky, I will too.

The Monk and The Philosopher is a book-length dialogue between father and son Jean-Francois Revel and Matthieu Ricard. Jean-Francois is an atheist philosopher, Mattheiu is a Tibetian buddhist monk. They talk about science, religion and the meaning of life. What adds some spice is that, before he was a monk, Mattheiu was a molecular biologist, with a well-received PhD and a promising career in a cutting-edge field. Below are some quotes from Mattheiu, actually taken from three far apart bits of the book (pages 17,113,218) but put together by me.

It’s true that biology and theoretical physics have brought us some fascinating knowledge about the origins of life and the formation of the universe. But does knowing such things help us elucidate the basic mechanisms of happiness and suffering? It’s important not to lose sight of the goals that we set ourselves. To know the exact shape and dimensions of the Earth is undeniably progress. But whether it it’s round or flat doesn’t make a great deal of difference to the meaning of existence…

[The goal of Buddhism] is inner science, a science that’s been developed over more than two thousand years of contemplation and study of the mind. Especially in Tibet, since the eighth century, that science was the principle preoccupation of a large part of the population. The goal was never to transform the external world, but to transform it in producing better human beings, in allowing human beings to develop an inward knowledge of themselves…

[Science,] if too hastily taken for a panacea, can also ecliplse the search for wisdom. Science is essentially analytical and therefore tends to get lost in the inexhaustible complexity of phenomena. Science covers such a vast field of discovery that it’s captivated the interest and energy of many of the brightest minds of our times. It’s like a never-ending gold-rush. The spiritual approach is a very different one, because it deals with the principles underlying knowledge and ignorance, happiness and suffering. Science only takes account of the tangible or mathematical proofs, while the spritual approach recognises the validity of intimate conviction arising from contemplative experience.

The Monk and the Philosopher: a father and son discuss the meaning of life. Jean-Francois Revel & Matthieu Ricard (1997). Schocken Books, New York

Also, Mike, whereever you are, you recommended me this book in 1998, so thanks – i’ve finally got round to reading it.

The British government has requested the release of five former UK residents being held in Guantánamo Bay, the Foreign Office said today.

The foreign secretary, David Miliband, has written to the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, asking that the men be freed from the US base in Cuba. They are not British nationals but had lived in the UK before they were detained, the Foreign Office said.

The decision by the prime minister, Gordon Brown, marks a break from his predecessor, Tony Blair, who generally held that the British government was not obliged to seek the release of Guantánamo inmates who had lived in Britain but did not hold citizenship.

One morning Goldmund awoke soon after dawn and lay in bed for a while, thinking. Images from a dream still floated about him, but randomly. He had been dreaming of his mother and of Narcissus and could still distinctly see both figures. When he had shaken off those wisps of his dream he became aware of an unusual light, a strange brightness entering through the little window opening. He jumped up and ran to the window, where he saw that the sill, the stable roof, the courtyard entrance and the whole countryside beyond reflected a bluish-white shimmer: the first snow of winter had fallen. The contrast between the restlessness of his heart and silent, submissive winter world saddened him. How quietly, with what touching devotion, did field and forest, hill and moor surrender to wind, rain, drought and snow; with what beauty and patient suffering did maple and ash bear their winter burden! Couldn’t one become like them, couldn’t one learn something from them? Deep in thought he went out into the courtyard, waded through the snow, felt it with his hands, walked across to the garden and looked over the snow-topped fence at the stems of the rose-bushes weighed down by the snow.